/ 




asc:ending bald .\\i)rNrAiN, near deadwocju, f i;. & .w. v. k. r. 



THIS CHARMING LITTLE BOOK 



IS IN THE MAIN A REPRINT OF AN ARTICLE ENTITLED 

■'A DRIVE THROUGH THE BLACK HILLS," | 

\ 

i 

WHICH APPEARED IN THE APRIL NUMBER OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, \ 



WITH THE AUTHOR'S CONSENT IS PRESENTED TO THE TRAVELING PUBLIC, 



Compliments of the "North- Western Line." 



Copyright, 1892, by "The North-Western Line; 



C. GAGE A SONS. 



Black H'lls 





[t is five o'clock in the morning as we pass througli Buffalo Gap and swing up 
Fall River Canon. The walls of the canon are steep; the sky is like a gray 
awning stretched from cliff to cliff. The old moon, worn to a thin crescent, 
drops an occasional spangle into the river, which goes tumbling from us first 
on one side of the track, then on the other. Every now and then the noise 
of the locomotive is drowned by the roar of a waterfall, a roar which is half echo, and the falls 
assume strange breadths and elongations in the half-light. We leave a trail of curling white 
smoke behind us, which pulls itself out and hangs like mist over the water. The atmosphere 
is peculiarly clear. Gradually the sky turns a whiter gray, and seems to rise slowly and 
majestically beyond the reach of the crags; things begin to assume individual forms; the pines 
loosen themselves from the black mass of the walls; the bowlders assert their curves; the river 
is turning a nacreous pink on account of a great blush that has risen from the east, and 
swallowed the pale slip of the old moon. 




C.uLD CREEK CANON, NEAR HUT SPRINGS. 



. As we ascend, the sky steadily rises and broadens above us. Then .the pink blush is 
evaporated by a luminous blue, and the world seems suddenly to have broken into color. We 
shoot a long, shrill whistle at a little white town at the head of the canon, and slacken our 
pace. We have reached the Minnekahta (Hot) Springs. We are at the threshold of the Hills. 

History dawned on these Hills only eighteen years ago. The first gleam of light came 
with the order sent General Custer by General Sheridan, then of the department of the 
Missouri, "to organize an expedition at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, for the pur- 
pose of reconnoitering a route from that post to Bare Butte in the Black Hills, and exploring 
the country south, southeast, and southwest of that point, and to return within sixty days from 
the time of his departure from it." 

The numerous explorations into the great Northwest since the days of Lewis and Clark 
had confined themselves for the most part to the valley of the Missouri and its branches. 
The Canadian voyageur and other strange variants of the human species incident to the fur 
trade were, of course, acquainted with the plains beyond the river, and knew the mountains 
that shoot out of them like a rugged black island out of a yellow sea. But their career 
represents little more than a fascinating chapter in a long story of adventure. They left many 
pretty traditions, and a French name on the creeks where they had stopped and traded; then, 
as it were, the waters closed over their passage. 

In 1855, some twenty years before Custer's detail. General Harney had skirted the Hills 
■with a view of establishing a route to the far west, and determining an easy way between the 
various frontier military posts. This expedition was continued the following year by General 




IS N1;AK IdKI' KOHINSCIN, NORTH NHBRASKA. 



Warren, under whom it assumed something of a scientific chiaracter. They entered the Hills 
by the east branch of Beaver Creek, and pushed as far north as Inyan Kara. Here their prog- 
ress was opposed by a large band of Sioux buffalo herders, and they were forced to retrace 
their steps. The expedition thus interrupted, and which would have been resumed but for the 
outbreak, of the civil war, resulted in a map of the Black Hills and several scientific papers 
touching the geology of the country. 

But Custer's expedition was epoch-making. Its epoch-making feature was the presence 
among his party of a number of miners, who availed themselves of every opportunity during the 
rapid march to prospect for gold. It is commonly believed in the Hills that small parties of gold- 
seekers had penetrated the country long before 1874. It is said that the Indians who came down 
to trade at the frontier posts in a far earlier day frequently brought gold-dust with them., and that 
they fully understood its value. This gold, and especially the comprehension of its worth, no doubt 
proved that they had had some intercourse with these early miners; and the fact that these 
miners should never have come down from the Hills to tell their own story, throws a light 
on the character of the intercourse. These legends are all substantiated by prospect holes and 
ruined cabins, not to be otherwise accounted for. 

On Lookout Mountain, in the northern Hills, a table was discovered some five years 
ago, bearing the date 1833, and the names of seven miners and their history laconically written by 
the last survivor of the party. One side of the stone says: ."Came to the Hills in 1833, 
seven of us, all dead but me!" And the other side: "Got all the gold we could carry, our 
ponies all got by the Indians. I have lost my gun and nothing to eat and Indians hunting me." 




SCHNH NUAR ClISTliK, S. \> 



There is the story of Father de Smet, too, a Jesuit missionary, who went out to the 
Indians of the far west as early as 1825. The Father seems to have written nothing on the 
subject, and word of mouth is easily distorted. But there is at least one reliable quotation 
from him which is to be found in a letter from General Sheridan to General Sherman, written 
in 1875. "While living with the Sioux Indians he (de Smet) was shown by them nuggets 
of gold, which they informed him had been obtained at different points in the Black Hills. . . . 
On his representation that such yellow metal was of the greatest value, they told him that 
they knew where there was a mountain of it. Subsequent investigation, however, proved that 
the mountain of gold was , nothing more than a formation of yellow mica, such as may be 
found in the above described country." 

However all this may be, it was General Custer's report which solidified a legend into 
a fact, and through its consequences brought about the purchase of the Hills from the Sioux. 
The tenor of this report, considering its subject, could scarcely he called enthusiastic. He speaks 
of his faith in a "very even if not a very rich distribution of gold throughout entire valleys." 
There was no discovery of gold deposits in quartz; no large nuggets were found; still he 
believed that "while the miner may not in one panful of earth find nuggets of large size 
or deposits of astonishing richness, to be followed by days and weeks of unrewarded labor, he 
may reasonably expect in certain localities to realize from every panful of earth a handsome 
return for his labor." Professor Newman tells us that at that time the presence of gold in 
the Hills, at least in any quantity, was strongly denied by high scientific authority, on the 
ground of their supposed general structure, and also by many members of Custer's expedition,, 



who would be supposed to h;i\e had the opportunity of practically testing' the question. But 
gold is a word without limitations. Gold had been found, and that statement brought with 
it a glare which blinded people to every attenuating consideration. The year 1874 represented 
a pause in the history of gold discovery, and the verbal accounts of the new El Dorado, 
accounts which, however exaggerated, could this time at least rest upon an official document, 
fell like pregnant germs on the popular fancy. The word traveled through the frontier settle- 
ments like the breath of fever, inflating and distorting every imagination. It sent an electric 
shock through that great floating mass, that heterogeneous compound that constitutes the world 
of gold-hunters. They knew the exact character of the dangers incident to an encroachment 
upon Indian rights; they knew that the Government, in compliance with the treaty made with 
the Sioux in 1868, was bound to protect the latter against an invasion of their permanent 
reservation by white men. Nevertheless the winter of 1874-5 found several parties in the 
Hills, among others one consisting of the prospectors who had accompanied Custer, while miners 
from Montana, Colorado, and even California, began to pour into the little settlements outside 
of the foothills. 

The Government was soon compelled to take cognizance of the situation. Troops were 
stationed at all accessible points leading to the Hills, and a company of cavalry under Captain 
Mix, then commanding officer at Fort Laramie, was ordered into the Hills to remove any 
parties of miners that might be found there. The consequences of their removal only aggra- 
vated matters. The parties brought down by the troops became the objects of the most intense 
interest. Their stories were listened to with avidit}'. Interviews with them were panned out 

12 



for every newspaper throughout the west. The necessity of eluding the military lent a certain 
gusto to the new undertakings. Parties driven out in one direction reappeared in another. 
Their number was rapidly multiplying. They concentrated at certain points, and showed a 
disposition to resist the troops as well as the Indians, should the occasion demand it. 

Then the inevitable occurred. It was far easier for the Government to buy otT the 
Indians than to hold the country for them. What the sale of the Black Hills represented in 
the Indian problem could scarcely be seriously considered. That the Indians were to be allured 
from their well-timbered heights and fertile valleys to barren plains which could only support 
them so long as the buffalo lasted; that then, ignorant of the primary labors of civilization, 
they would be called upon to solve its problems, to turn a waste into fertility by improved 
methods of agriculture; that an indulgent Government would alternately feed them with a spoon 
that they might become self-supporting, or starve them into revolt that they might learn sub- 
mission; that the proposed system of reservation and ration would inevitably come to be a 
bribe to the national sentimentality — conscience money to the idealism of the nation which rejects 
the brutal fact that might is right — were points of view which it concerned no one to adopt. 

By order of President Grant, secret inquiries were made to ascertain the feelings of the 
Indians concerning the relinquishment of the Black Hills. The result of these inquiries went 
to prove that the Indians were divided among themselves; that some were willing to part with 
the country provided an enormous price could be obtained for it, and that others, the young 
generation, refused to consider the question at all. In June of 1875, a commission was 
appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to hold a grand council with the Sioux in order to 




Y •• AND SOME OF THE TRIBE. 



secure to the citizens of the United States the right to mine in the Black Hills. The council 
met on the twentieth day of September, but nothing was accomplished, as the Indians had 
arrived at no understanding among themselves. Four meetings followed, in the course of which, 
Red Dog, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, Black Coal, Dead Eyes, and several species of Bears and 
Wolves, informed the commissioners, with all the flowers of rhetoric, that they would sell only 
that portion of the Black Hills which contained gold, that the lower valleys and foothills were 
their fertile pastures and that they did not choose to part with them. For the gold-bearing 
central Hills they demanded the sum of ^70,000,000, besides support for seven generations to come. 

In 1876 another commission was appointed. In the time which intervened between the 
"two commissions the Indians had come to realize that they were scarcely the arbiters of the 
pending question, and they signed a treaty at Red Cloud Agency ceding the entire area of the 
Black Hills girdled by the north and south forks of the Cheyenne River. This treaty, wherein 
the Government agreed to furnish the Indians with supplies until they should become self-sup- 
porting, and in a vague way tc ''provide all necessary aid to assist the said Indian in the 
work of civilization," without further mention of the $70,000,000, was ratified by Congress on 
the twenty-eighth of February, 1877. 

The Hills were thrown open to white settlement. The trails that the mountain sheep 
haH cut along the hill-sides up from the valleys, and which the Indians had worn into paths, 
were broadened into wagon roads, and years later the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley 
Kailroad had laid its rails along the road from the south and penetrated the Hills. 




SCENE ON 1-. E. & M. V 



Minnekahta (Hot) Springs, October First — It is a day all of light, one of those 
dazzling days of hidian summer when one can find stars in the atmosphere. The season is 
over, and the hotels begin to look like dance hails by daylight. The towns supported by 
tourists, agriculture, or stock interests could only come with the reflux from the mining dis- 
tricts, and are consequently of a more recent date. 

Minnekahta (Hot) Springs is five years old. The rheumatic ranchman of early days, or 
the cowboy who first took a run this way to soothe the exasperation of the "Texas itch," took 
his bath in an Indian tub hewn out of stone in the shape of a moccasin. This tub was the 
nucleus of a little thermal town of tepees, which soon melted away before a claim cabin; and 
this claim cabin, constituting to itself what might be called the old quarter, has been put on 
wheels and unceremoniously trotted off to the far end of the town to make way for the stone 
hotel, at which we are stopping. There are a few parties here who, like ourselves, are about 
to take a driving tour; others who, relieved of a slight touch of rheumatism, linger on to 
follow up their cure with the tonic of long walks. 

One must not for a moment assume that only invalids are attracted here. On the 
contrary, each spring the place is literally overrun — taken possession of by -pleasure-seekers and 
recreation " fiends," who fill up hotels, exhaust livery barns, tramp over the mountains, through 
the glens, explore the caverns, swim in the magnificent plunge bath, from morn till night, and 
wind up the day by "tripping the light fantastic" till midnight. True, the rheumatics who 
take the baths are soon limbered up, and participate in the recreations of the pleasure-seekers, 
and none among the throng are so grateful as these to "Mother Earth" for her fountains of 









■'*''•. ■.•.•^\,- 



■^ 



■ "''•^-"-•^-'TiWiiiii r ' -'1 



ATI I'll iK \T1 W ( ir I'LlNi,! l;\m. Ill iT Sl'KlN'uS, S. L). 



health, or the beautiful place and superb climate in which she chose to establish her sanitarium. 
Here are both health and pleasure. 

The baths are supplied by four main springs here, and one large and several smaller 
springs at the Catholicon, one and one-half miles east, the largest of which goes to form a 
luxurious plunge 200x50 feet. The others flow into the tiled and marble tubs of an excellently 
appointed sanitarium. This water that caresses you deliciously with its tiny bubbles rises out 
of the ground at a temperature of ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit, requiring neither exposure to 
the air nor the addition of cold water. The analysis of the Hot Springs of Minnekahta, made 
by Professor Mariner of Chicago, is as follows: — 

Grains pek Gallon. 

Silica, 2.464 

Calcium Carbonate, 16.352 

Magnesium Carbonate, 4.320 

Potassium and Sodium Sulphate, 25.620 

Sodium and Potassium Chloride, 13.790 

Peroxyd of Iron, a trace 

Total, ___ 62.546 

It is eminently a rheumatism cure, though numerous other virtues have also been ascribed 
to it, virtues which could be partly attributed to the invigorating air of the Hills. These four 
main springs, with eight or ten small ones, come together and form Fall River, which flows 
about ten miles in its own bed, depositing its mineral so gradually, losing so little of its heat 
that the frogs find heart to sing on its banks with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero. 




NTI-:KI( iK \IE\V OF PLUNGE BATH, UVT SPRINGS, S. U 



The history of Minnekahta has naturally produced much that might be called in min.er 
phrase, "spring excitement." There has been prospecting for and locating of springs in this region 
just as there has been prospecting for gold and tin further north. So far nothing has proved 
worthy of a boom except a group of springs on the old Sidney stage road about twelve miles 
from Minnekahta. Rising within a stone's throw of each other, they are proclaimed to possess 
distinct medicinal qualities. The temperature is between fifty and sixty degrees. These Cas- 
cade Springs converge and form the Cascade Creek, which flows over a bed of turquoise and 
malachite tints into the Cheyenne. The springs are the property of a syndicate, which dreams 
of seeing a great health and pleasure resort rise, as Minnekahta has, out of the beneficent vapor 
of the water. 

All this southern section of the country is rich in a hard sandstone, white and dull pink, 
which promises substantial, sunny towns to the dark laps of the Hills. The great belt of 
gypsum, too, has already given rise to a few little stuccoed houses that crop out of the abrupt 
side of the heights, with a pretty Italian eifect. The vegetation here consists of a variant of 
the spruce, small sturdy trees planting themselves resolutely among the rocks, and thriving there 
in a way calculated to encourage every form of human endeavor. They grow everywhere, 
down the rocky sides of the canons, along the capricious angles of the cliffs; they crowd each 
other off the narrow foothold of a needle, and seem almost human with intention. Here and 
there they step up or down in deference to a great rib of marble protruding from the hill- 
side. They lend a sombre charm to a landscape which without them would produce an 
impression of ragged dreariness, and the air seems Durer for their wholesome, vigorous smell. 

21 



f^* _*1 <JU^-\^f~ 









From Hot Springs we turn our horses' heads toward Custer. We drive under a sky 
that seems to twinkle with electric flashes, and over a rolling prairie covered with a yellow 
frizzle of buffalo grass. We have left the trees. As we rise over the yellow swell, distant 
hills bulge up from various points of the horizon. They are of a black blue, the blue of 
the California plum, and the haze that the light throws on them is like the bloom of the 
fruit. A thin cloud before the sun would turn them to an intense black. From that circum- 
stance they acquired their name. 

Our driver entertains us with stories bearing upon the treachery of the Indian and the 
simplicity of the tenderfoot. He was a stage driver in early days, and his talk affords us the 
essentially western luxury of learning history from one of the makers thereof. He confesses 
that the extraordinary development of the country surprised no one more than it did him. 
Who could have imagined it? When the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad Com- 
pany built their road to the Hills, he thought "that them folks was sett'n' a b'ar trap fur 
ter ketch a bedbug;" "but I reckon they ketched a b'ar," he adds, willing to do full justice to 
superior foresight. 

At the end of two hours we reach Wind Cave, where we make a halt, and the next 
five hours are spent in fairy land. We are requested to slip into overalls, and thus metamor- 
phosed, we let ourselves down a hole into which we disappear through an exhalation of cold 
wind. This cave is in the limestone formation, gnawed out by the streams that sink there. 
It has been explored for a distance of two miles and a half only, and the passage is as yet 
a very narrow one. (Since this was written sixty-five miles and seventy-six rooms have been 




, h '\\ ,.il.i,l., M l|. I II 



explored in this cave.) Our guide disappears every minute lilce an eel through a hole; we 
shout to him, and from the other side of a rock partition he instructs us to "keep right 
on a-millin'." So we "mill" right along; that is, we do much climbing with hands and knees, 
much tobogganing and some groveling. 

This exceedingly varied locomotion is seven or eight times interrupted by the chambers 
on our way. Some of these seem to be hung in petrified cobwebs, through the meshes cf 
which we can insert our tapers and awaken exquisite colors, pinks and reds for the most part. 
There are vestibules that seem to be ceiled and walled with orange buds, and others in which 
these buds have burst into capricious blossoms that look like tiny Japanese fireworks petrified 
into diamond or turned into snow, and all so delicate that they are shivered and disappear at 
the slightest touch. There are long ribbons of stalactite formation, damp and of a fishy pink, 
that creep about the passages like the tentacles of some enormous sepia. There are great 
broken geodes half embedded in the wall, disclosing rows of crystals, like mouths opened in a 
petrified laugh; short stalactites and stalagmites in process of formation, holding a drop of 
water like a pearl at the point of their needles. 

The box formation is the predominant feature of the cave, so far as it has been 
explored, — intricate mazes of pigeon holes, from three to ten inches deep, divided and subdivided 
by infinite partitions, forming niches, miniature shrines, pagodas of fairylike architecture, which 
glow with a pink and red light as we thrust our tapers into them. None of the chambers 
are very large; they are even comparatively low. They produce no impression of grandeur or 
awe. Their beauty is the beauty of detail, marvelously exquisite. As the cave is said to 

25 



extend thirteen miles in one direction alone, the starlit halls and the cathedral naves are no 
doubt merely standini;; in wait. (Since the foregoing was written the explorations have been 
extended vastly and with most surprising results.) 

The old Custer stage road, as we find it again after leaving the cave, leads up through 
a region so totally different from that which we have left behind us, that it would seem as 
though the world had been transformed during the live hours we spent under ground. We 
drive through an arroyc, enclosed between rugged, gray palisades, surmounted by pines which 
are extremely tall and rich in color. The hollow of the arroyo is filled with the quivering 
gold of the Cottonwood. Every now and then the eye is caught and held by the intense tone 
of a scarlet vine tlung around the trunk, of a tree or creeping among mosses, over gray rocks. 
The walls of the canon broaden and rise, the palisades disappear, and we drive on for several 
miles between thickly wooded parks strangely wild and lonely. The hush of the wood is 
occasionally broken by a startled deer that goes bounding from us, and loses himself in the 
colonnade of pines. Chipmonks with erect tails skim like exhalations along the fallen trees, 
and flights of belated bluebirds, that seem unusually blue, rise with a whir and disappear in 
the velvet tops of the pines. 

As we emerge onto a height, we are suddenly confronted by imposing masses of granite 
bearing the eccentric name of Calamity Jane Peaks. These masses are the southern portals of 
the granite region of the Hills. It is difficult to translate into words the effect which 
they produce. They are massive enough to create the impression of squarely seated, immova- 



ble weight, and high enough to be bold. The vegetation at their base is kixiiriant, and still 
they have expanse enough of bare gray rock to be dreary. 

The Jane of the terrible epithet who gave her name to these heights, was the first to 
ascend them, and is said to have celebrated the event by tossing up her cap and riddling it 
with bullets in full view of the troops below. This extraordinary product of frontierism made 
her appearance in the Hills in 1875, with the troops accompanying Professor Jenney's scien- 
tific expedition. The people of Custer remember her in buckskins, six shooter in belt, riding 
among the soldiers and answering the roll call to the mystification of the officers. Her prow- 
esses and misdeeds filled this wild region with anecdotes. After having carried a woman's 
caprices through all the most reckless phases of a man's life, she fell a victim to the tender 
passion, and is now leading an existence of conjugal felicity somewhere in Montana. " Of 
woman flesh and horse flesh," the Arabs say, "one can predict nothing." 

Pushing on through Custer, and leaving the stage road, we find ourselves again immersed 
in a forest of wonderful beauty. The ground is covere^^with a thick carpet of K'neck-k'neck, 
green with the green of the holly, and bearing berries like a thick sprinkling of coral beads. 
Here we find spruce, some fir, clumps of willows of a feathery Japanesque effect, and a young 
growth of birch and aspen — a tangle of wire limbs from which the round yellow leaves dangle 
like gold coins to be whiffed off by the first cold winds in little dancing oblique showers. 
Great granite masses hump their hacks above the trees. This beautiful wood is called Custer 
Park. The center of the park forms a bed of about ten acres, enclosed between granite pali- 
sades, which is to be filled, I believe, and converted into a lake. At the far end from Cus- 



ter, and overlooking what is known as Sunday Gulch, the granite piles rise to a height of 
three and four hundred feet. They are broad and massive, or cut into saw teeth and slim 
needles of a most toppling etTect. Down the almost vertical caiion of which these are the 
walls, comes what would seem like a cataract of boulders suddenly stopped in its course. 
Beneath them is a thin stream tlghting its way to the valley. Each step down these boulders 
changes the scene as if by magic. The needles present ditferent shapes and poses at every 
angle; they seem to rise, bend and execute all manner of ponderous movements. In a far 
distance of peaceful blue, the Castle Creek divide is stretched across the narrow horizon, restful 
and dreamy in contrast with the tormented foregiound. 

We return to Custer by the same road, which we scarcely recognize. While we were 
in the canon a snow-storm has swept the forest and transformed it. It is not earnest snow, 
however; the flakes are small and light. They have merely thrown a sheen upon the pines 
and powdered the willows. The sky is gray but very soft. The sun looks down upon us 
like a luminous wafer. This is the first of those mock storms of early October that brush 
the sky, and leave it pure and bUie until Christmas. 

Custer City lies in the valley of the French Creek, at a short distance from the point 
where the first discovery of gold was made by the prospectors accompanying Custer's expedi- 
tion. When the discovery was made known, all trails and roads converged here, the heaviest 
influx pouring in through those from the south, by way of the Niobrara River, Sidney and 
Cheyenne. In June of 1875, as soon as General Custer had left the Hills, an "outfit," with 
a hundred and sixty-six men, pitched their camp on the site now occupied by Custer City, 



■where they found small parties of miners struggling with the hygienic problem of wild meats 
■"straight." They combined forces and constituted themselves a town company; measured off 
one square mile with a tape line; christened this square mile "Stonewall," in an Impulse of 
enthusiasm for the great southerner, and sold a number of lots. This was in July. In the 
same month, General Crook, with a small force of cavalry, arrived in the valley and issued a 
proclamation requesting the miners to leave the Hills before the fifteenth of August, under pain 
•of being captured and removed by the troops. On the tenth of August, twelve hundred miners 
held a meeting, the character of which proved their determination to only partially obey the 
requirements of the Government proclamation. They declared the proceedings of the first town 
company to be null, made a new survey of the town plat, substituted the name of Custer for 
that of Stonewall, divided the plat into twelve hundred lots, numbered them, and distributed 
them among themselves by drawing the numbers from a hat. On the fifteenth, all were led 
out by the military, with the exception of seven, who were permitted by General Crook to 
remain and guard the property. Captain Pollock succeeded Crook in the duty of protecting 
the Hills from the miners, but on the day of his removal by order of the Government, the 
miners flocked back and took possession of their town. 

In the early spring of 1876, occurred one of those crises peculiar to the history of min- 
ing regions; one of those extraordinary panics known as a "stampede," which might do for a 
striking allegory representing the power of gold, if people were not surfeited with such allegories. 
There came a rumor of a rich gold find in the Deadwood Gulch; and the new little town of 
Custer was emptied as if by magic. In a few weeks only thirty people out of six thousand 




SPECIMI-.N OF FUTTH FORMATION. 



were left to pursue the work in the valley of the French Creek. The log houses of the 
stampeders furnished fuel for those who remained, and in this smoke, it would seem, disappeared 
much of what constitutes the character of a frontier mining camp. 

Since the great exodus to the Deadwood Gulch, Custer has slowly but steadily grown. 
Its population today amounts to some nine hundred souls. As it stands now, trim and quiet 
in its smiling valley, it seems to have lost all memory of its hurdy-gurdy days, of the days 
when its atmosphere was all oxygen. It is shipping brick and lumber to all parts of the Hills, 
becoming a good market for the small grain produced throughout the valley, — a peaceful little 
town of green-shuttered homes, perched 5,640 feet above the sea, made accessible by railroad 
enterprise, and destined, I fancy, to suffer a grand invasion of tourists just as soon as its attrac- 
tions of scenery and climate are well understood throughout the States that it looks down into. 

Custer's nearest neighbor of importance is Hill City. The stage road that links the two 
places stretches itself in full view of the granite needles of the Harney range, through a land- 
scape whose picturesqueness is an emphasis of that which marks the southern approach to Cus- 
ter. We are to find the culmination of this beauty of stone and vegetation at Harney's Peak, 
and every turn in the road leading in that direction shifts the scene in crescendo. In Hill 
City one finds little that is distinctive; the same low structures, with little external indication 
of their use, drawn up in line along a central street and somewhat scattered about the lateral 
ones; the usual substantially built bank doing a flourishing business, a pair of gold scales on 
its counter, and the traditional six-shooter to preserve harmony in the minds of men. Although 
Hill City, like Custer, is situated in the most picturesque portion of the Hills, its future does 




UK 'KlNij LI 



not lie entirely in the hands of tourists. As the center of the Harney Peak tin district, its- 
history will no doubt be that of the Harney Peak Mining Company. 

Though tin was discovered in the Black Hills as early as 1877, the knowledge of the 
discovery was not generally disseminated nor its importance well understood until six years 
later. This is not surprising when one considers that in some proportion or quality every 
known mineral has been found in the area of the Hills. In the black sand found with the 
gulch gold shipped to Argo from the Harney Peak region, Professor Pierce of the metallurgical, 
laboratory of the Boston and Colorado Smelting Works, determined the presence of cassiterite. 
His discovery, announced to a gold-fevered community, produced, of course, no impression. In 
1883 a citizen of Rapid City began to prospect for tin, and shipped samples of the ore to 
California for examination. These samples were assayed by Professor Blake, whose report on 
the subject, published in the "American Journal of Science," of September, 1883, brought about 
a closer examination of the tin veins by practical miners and geologists. Several companies- 
were soon incorporated, the most prominent of which was the Etta of New York. This com- 
pany, full of faith in the richness of the veins in the Harney Peak district, made great expend- 
itures in acquiring most of the tin claims in that locality. An increase of capital soon 
became necessary, and the New York stockholders made propositions to certain English capitalists,, 
among whom were Lord Thurlow, and the Baring-Gould brothers. The Harney Peak Tin 
Mining and Milling Company was the outgrowth of these successful negotiations. 

The news of the discovery of tin in the Black Hills stirred, as was inevitable, questions 
of tariff and protection, and the new corporation became the butt of all forms of newspaper 



ferocities. Still this Harney Company, which owns the entire site of Hill City, nearly a. 
thousand quartz claims, and four thousand acres of placer ground, does not seem to have grown 
weary of acquiring new claims. In regard to these mines and the attitude of the Company,, 
one can hear, even within the walls of the foothills, the most bewildering pros and cons, not 
totally free perhaps from the taint of personal interests or individual politics; and accordingly 
"the veins contain nothing, and the developments of the Company are a blind," or then the 
blind has an opposite motive; "the Company is gradually getting everything under its control 
and working slowly towards a tremendous monopoly." The ore treated in California and New- 
York is said to contain from two to four per cent tin. An average sample taken from the- 
crushed and mixed bulk of ten tons proceeding from the fourteen principal groups of mines, 
and analyzed by Professors Fred and Arthur C. Claudet, assayers to the Bank of England, has. 
been found to contain 2.94 per cent of metallic tin. The veins lie between clearly defined- 
walls of slate. 

The developments made by the Harney Peak Company consist in shafts from fifty tO' 
a hundred feet deep in the greater number of the mines, steam hoists, pumping and com- 
pressed-air machinery in the four principal properties, drifting, sloping, and some tunneling. 
The longest tunnel, 960 feet, is that of the Tenderfoot, situated between Custer and Hill City.. 
A mill of two hundred and fifty tons daily capacity is now being constructed on Spring Creelc 
near Hill City. The Addie Mine, into which we descended to a depth of three hundred feet,, 
was resonant with the power drill, the muffled rumbling of the blasts, the click of the picks,,, 
every evidence of earnest work. 



Harney Peak, October Ninth. — We are in reality only 8,200 feet above the sea, but 
we are on the pinnacle of the Black Hills, and as all things are relative, we seem to be 
standing on the summit of things, with the world rolling from us to the horizon in great cir- 
cular waves. According to Professor Henry Newton, the geology of these hills is simply and 
generally as follows : Around a nucleal area of metamorphic slates and schists, containing masses 
of granite, the various members of the sedimentary series of rocks, the Potsdams, Carboni- 
ferous, Trias or Red Beds, Jura, Cretaceous, and Tertiary, lie in rudely concentric belts or 
2ones of varying width, dipping on all sides away from the elevatory axis of the Hills. From 
the Hills outward the inclination of the beds gradually diminishes until all evidence of the 
elevation is lost in the usually rolling configuration of the Plains. Separated as they are by 
more than one- hundred miles from the nearest spui' or sub-range of the Rocky Mountains, they 
are a complete study in themselves. E.xhibiting in the strata exposed and in the general char- 
acter of the elevation most of the principal features of the geology of the Rocky Mountains, 
they are a geological epitome of the neighboring portions of that great range. It has else- 
where been said very graphically that the "central nucleus has been thrust up through the 
different sedimentary formations, much as one could thrust his fist up through the layers of 
a very large jelly cake." If the Hills were shorn of their timber, we could almost realize 
from the summit on which wc stand that the bedding planes that dip from us are almost 
perpendicular. As it is, what we really see is a wilderness of wooded peaks encircled by a 
broad valley, the Red \alley, which the Indians cull the Race Course, this in turn enclosed 



by a wall of foot-hills. It is all curiously symmetrical — a castle of geologic dimensions, with 
domes and turrets and a broad moat within its ramparts. Among these domes and turrets, 
rise the innumerable streams that scar the mountain sides with canons and gulches, and then 
disappear before reaching the valley wherever the limestone deposits open for them a sub- 
terranean passage. 

Of the snow that fell a few days since, the sun has left but a delicate arabesque on 
the granite cap of this pinnacle. Double rows of enormous needles radiate from us to the 
foot of the mountain, like great causeways which the pines seem to be climbing in solemn, 
stargazing files. I can find no word luminous enough to qualify the atmosphere. It is 
literally of light, of that intense light which cheats distances and draws the horizons nearer 
together. We look through our eyelashes over the heads of mountains, and see the far-off 
plains and the snow-covered ranges of other States. Nebraska lies south of us, flat and 
yellow like a great field of ripe corn; Wyoming ends in an undulating line of blue, the Big- 
horn, touched here and there with a glint of snow. To the west we look into the accursed 
region of the Bad Lands, redeemed and transfigured by the glory of the sun into a broad 
plain of pure gold. Then there are the unidentified distances, the most beautiful of all; the 
vaporous blue country of dreams in which we loosen our fancies, and mentally roam without 
limit. 

On our way down we go winding about the great causeways, from the heights of 
which, if there were anyone there to look at us, we would seem like a hurrying procession of 
ants. But we are sure of being entirely alone on the mountain. Our mountain-sheep trail 



5oses itself constantly among the low-limbed spruce, under the moss, or around the huge piles 
of granite. There is something delicious in this loneliness and silence; not a sound but the 
forest sounds, which come to be other forms of stillness, a breath of wind in the trees, the 
■trickling of a spring. We realize the grade of our trail as we reach the foot of the moun- 
fain. We have been less than two hours coming down a distance which it took us over 
three hours to ascend. 

As we travel from Hill City to Deadwood, we leave the granites behind us. The deep 
canons through which we pass are enclosed within flaky heights of slate rock. We are 
traversing another geological zone. We are gradually losing the pines, too. Within some 
twenty miles of Deadwood the hills are entirely bare, shorn to supply the great reduction 
■works with fuel. The streams that come tumbling toward us are all of a reddish brown, 
like liquid clay. They have been interrupted in their course, and this is how they have 
returned to their beds after a whirl through the great mills and a close contact with gold. 

Deadwood, the great mining center of the Hills, lies in the deep gulches of the White- 
wood and the Deadwood creeks. It was twice destroyed, once by fire in 1879, when, it is 
said, a million and a half dollars evaporated in pine smoke; then again in 1883, when 
abnormal snows and rains sent the mountain streams down the gulches in avalanches; and 
strange to say, it was both times rebuilt over its original site, with the main street running 
down the gulch and the cross streets scrambling up the hill sides, over the very ground 
where the miners of 1876 staked their claims and panned out their gold. 




i^i-LNL MAK IjLAL'WuuD, l'. H. & .M. \'. K. K. 



The wild days of the history of Dead wood are included between 1877 and 1885 — the 
days of "excitements," of "hurdy-gurdies" and the hazing of the "tenderfoot," — for although 
the town was incorporated as a city in I88O, its mining-camp character only disappeared 
totally several years after that time. From 1876 to 1877, the pioneers may be said to have 
fought the grizzly and the elements. The striking feature of Deadwood today is its deco- 
rousness, at least its outward decorousness. It is perhaps that of the blaze' who has had his 
fill of the kind of excitement which finds a vent in noise and broils. However that may 
be, the streets of this town of men, and of men more or less bent on the same pursuit 
and breathing an atmosphere avowedly intoxicating, are as quiet by night as they are by day. 
The advent of two railroads, with their narrow gauges to Lead City and Bald Mountain, their 
spurs up every gulch and to the very dumps of nearly every mine, absorbing all the traffic 
formerly done by ox-teams, drays, and stages, has cleared the streets of much noise and 
encumbrance, but also of much local color. In these towns the typical disappears with the 
lawless. 

One is greatly impressed here by the absence, or at least the scarcity, of women. 
The streets are filled with men of every type, class and condition, including a sprinkling of 
Chinese — for Deadwood has its Chinatown, a dash of spray from the great wave that broke 
on the Pacific Coast. This yellow population of about a hundred souls is settled at the far 
■end of the town, in houses of a non-committal exterior, which they have disemboweled and 
the interior of which they have rearranged to suit their needs. They never interfered with 
the miners, and consequently have always been well treated. They did some placer mining 




;v:^i— 



i-LL.WA, NrAK 1 .i Al .\Vt H ib, i-. b 



'On claims which had been abandoned for exhausted by the whites, then turned to their other 
industries, Chinese importations and laundries. 

If women are scarce in the streets of Deadwood they are even more so in the hotels. 
At dinner last night we counted forty men to two women. The types were interesting. The 
talk was exclusively on one subject. Certain metahic words seemed to detach themselves from 
•diiferent parts of the room, to be caught as by an echo and circulated uninterruptedly like a 
■cough through a silent congregation. Here and there was the well-known gaunt figure in 
blue overalls, throwing into the small, natural movements of life that overstrength which sug- 
,gests ponderous tools. 

1 am impressed with the mighty change a very short time has effected in these Hills, 
when I compare the present with the very brief past. Here I am, after a delightful journey 
■of a few hours' travel on a splendid railroad, in a palatial car, through an interesting agricul- 
iural country, investigating a large number of rich gold and silver mines, which have, since 
1877, produced over one hundred million dollars in bullion, and are still producing millions 
■every year, with apparently an inexhaustible supply of ore to continue to draw from. 
Here are a number of substantial cities of brick and stone buildings, which would show 
creditably in any cities in the country. In these Hills are thermal springs, which have proven 
a specific for many diseases, with scenery as beautiful as the world-famous mountains of 
Switzerland, and a climate unsurpassed in the world, — all attracting thousands of tourists each 
year, who are entertained in magnificent hotels. And yet the following clipped from a file of 




li;au c^r^ 



"Scribner's Magazine" of 1877, one year only after these Hills had been ceded by the Indians. 
to the United States government, shows the impression of a writer at that time, only fifteen 
years ago. The article is earnestly written, and comes to a conclusion with a paragraph 
which I here insert, as an indication of how completely astray the mind of even a careful 
observer may be led: "Summed up briefly the condition of mining afi'airs in the Black Hills 
is this: Placer mines all taken up; quartz mines the only resource left. In order to work 
these, capital, machinery and mills for the crushing of ore must be introduced. Men of 
wealth will hesitate at sending money into a country so far from railroad communication 
and about which so little is known. Most of the men now in the Black Hills are laboring 
men, inexperienced as miners. Their chances for employment, then, are small, and their 
prospects in quartz mining are even poorer. The average Deadwood mine will just about 
pay 'grub,' and those that pay good living wages are rare. Seven out of every ten men 
in the whole region have no money and no means of getting any. 1 have no hesitation 
in saying that 1 think the Black Hills will eventually prove a failure." 

It was in the early summer of the year in which this article was written that two 
California capitalists, George Hurst and J. B. Haggin, sent an expert practical miner into the 
Hilis to make a thorough investigation of the gold district, and use his own discretion in the 
purchase of claims there. The result of the investigation was the bonding of the ' ' Dead- 
wood" and the "Homestake" mines for $80,000 and $45,000, respectively. A report of the 
condition of affairs in this gold region brought Mr. Hearst into the Hills. The bargain for 
the two mines was immediately closed, and in less than two months from the time of the 



first investigation, an eighty-stamp mill, costing $100,000, was in operation. The remoteness- 
of the Black Hills from railroad communication does not seem to have been considered an 
adverse circumstance by the capitalists in question, for after all, if it is true that investments 
follow railroads the rule works almost equally well the other way. The machinery for this 
first mill, and much of the material for the Company's narrow-gauge railway extending over 
some thirteen miles, were manufactured in San Francisco, shipped to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and 
thence carried by ox-teams over three hundred miles to the mines, the additional cost 
amounting to more than $30,000. It was not long before the original Homestake Company, 
of which George Hearst was first president, became consolidated. It now includes the Home- 
stake, Highland, Deadwood, Terra, and De Smet companies. In the "Engineering and Mining- 
Journal " for October 3, 1891, 1 find the total dividends of these mines to be: Deadwood- 
Terra, $1,030,000; De Smet, $1,125,000; Homestake, $4,756,750; the Terra having paid $75,000 
and the Deadwood $275,000 before consolidation. These ores are reduced in six extensive 
mills, in which upward of seven hundred stamps pound incessantly. The mines of the Home- 
stake and the Caledonia companies are situated in the same belt. The vein is composed of 
hydrous mica, chloritic and hornblende schists and quartz, generally enclosed between walls of 
porphyry and various forms of schists and slates. They are classed as bedded deposits, as 
distinguished from the more uncertain type of veins. They often exceed a hundred and fifty 
feet in thickness. The ore is of a low grade, yielding only from two and one-half to ten 
dollars per ton, but it occurs in inexhaustible quantities and admits of a method of treatment 
so simple and inexpensive that the profits are enormous. A visit to these mills fills one 




ClNTh'Al. CMV, IN 1)|;AL)\V(I( iLi liL'LCH. 



with an overpowering sense of tlie possibilities of work, and one is bewildered by the sta- 
tistics which sketch the proportions of such an enterprise. 

Bald Mountain, the Ruby Basin district and Carbonate Camp, whose mines have become 
dividend-paying only within the past few years, were prospected as early as 1876, and their 
history since the stampede there in 1877 represents a period of experiment and failure. The 
ore occurs in what is termed blanket veins, from three to one hundred and fifty feet wide, 
and ranging in value from ten dollars per ton upward into the hundreds. This ore, which 
could be mined without machinery of any kind, proved absolutely refractory to the simpler 
methods of treatment. During the twelve years which elapsed between 1877 and the con- 
struction of the smelting and chlorination works at Deadwood, mills and smelters were opened 
and closed, corporations sprung into life and died, according to the varying fortunes of the 
greater companies which were spending heavy sums in a stubborn effort to make their claims 
profitable. There were booms and collapses, faith and ridicule, and the history of stocks 
described the wildest zigzag. The Newberry-Vautin chlorination method solved the difficulty 
for the Golden Reward of Ruby Basin, proving that the reduction of all Bald Mountain and 
Ruby Basin ores was practicable. 

The Golden Reward Chlorination Works are at present producing bullion at the rate of 
;^33,000 per month. The cost of treatment is less than five dollars per ton for gold alone. 
As a great many deposits of that district carry silver ranging in value from eight to thirty 
dollars per ton, it is probable that means will soon be found of saving this silver for a 
nominal cost. Experiments made at the Dakota School of Mines proved that these same ores 




DRADWOOD GULCH, ONE-HALF MILE WEST OF CENTRAL CITY. 



might also be reduced by pyritic smelting. The process is at present being tested by the 
Deadwood & Delaware Company, which erected a plant at Deadwood in July, 1891, at a 
cost of $250,000. 

From Deadwood to Bald Mountain, by the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley (narrow 
gauge) Railroad. Another blue day. This is the twelfth of October and the air is almost 
balmy. The scenery is full of beauty and even of grandeiu' at certain points. Our train, 
which looks like a toy, is running up impossible heights and describing impossible curves, 
skirting precipices and skimming over trestles, leaving its tracks below in a tangle of loops 
and bends. A wonderful piece of engineering, the construction of this road, attacking grades 
of four hundred and thirty feet to the mile, and describing curves of one hundred and fifty 
feet radius. After an hour's ascension, the heights that close us in seem suddenly to drop 
away, and we look over an immeasurable expanse of dark blue hills and yellow prairies. Our 
car is wedged in between ore cars and flat cars. Our fellow passengers consist of a German 
family, of well-fed rotundity, and a stubby little pigeon-toed Chinese woman, whose wrists are 
covered with bangles and whose shining chignon is bristling with brass pins. On the flat car 
behind us is a group of an equally foreign appearance: two middle-aged men, a boy and a 
young woman. They have strong faces of a pronounced northern type. They do not seem 
to feel the necessity of conversation. The woman sits with her chin in her hand, her almost 
colorless gaze fixed on some point in the horizon. The boy holds a puppy in his arms, 
which he strokes now and then very soberly. The train stops in the midst of what would 




1)i:adw(.kiij gulch, unh mili; wi^st of chntral city. 



seem a wilderness. They climb down and unload the car with strong agility. They have 
lumber, a case of window panes, boxes and bags of groceries, bags of utensils and tools, bed- 
ding and clothes tied in a horse blanket, and a small stove — an embryo home. The things 
are heaped on either side of the track, and as the train pulls otT they stand amid their house- 
hold goods, screening their eyes from the sun, and watch us disappear around a curve. As 
; we lose them 1 feel as though I had peeped into the first chapter of a story and dropped the 
"book by the wayside. 

From Bald Mountain we make one of the crossings, and catch the Black Hills & Fort 
Pierre narrow gauge, which takes us down to Piedmont. This ride is perhaps no less beautiful 
"than the one up Bald Mountain, with all the etfects reversed. We spin down grade, and the 
Mis and high masses of rock seem to be climbing over each other and flying from us in a 
panic. We pass great fields of glistening stubble, stacks of harvested grain of a duller gold, 
peaceful nooks sheltered by high hills where trim little cabins have been built in the center of 
■cabbage-planted stretches, soft pastures where cows are browsing, then we drop suddenly into 
a wild canon, enclosed between great clitfs of limestone full of somberness and echoes. At 
Piedmont we find our horses, and resuming our drive we come upon Sturgis in the full glow 
■of sunset. Sunset in these hills is an hour of transfiguration. The little towns which we 
•come upon then may have their prosaic side, but they are very apt to carry this halo with 
them into our memory. 

The horizon is of a complex, bewildering order of beauty. If the colors on birds' wings, 
the varying tints of shells, and the lights that opals catch, could be blended and vaporized. 




LdnKINi^i VV FANTAIL i,rij 11, 1. L. \ M. \'. K. P. 



they might produce something of this eflfed. Sturgis, like a little dreamland town, lies in a 
valley with a slight inclination toward a creek, that looks like a rainbow lying on the ground. 
This valley is the Red Valley, the Indian race-course, the great agricultural zone of the Hills. 
Although this valley completely encircles the Hills, it is not everywhere so fertile as it is in 
this eastern portion, for the slope of the country being east, all the streams rising in the cen- 
tral and western hills drain these regions on their way to the Cheyenne. Then the heaviest 
rainfalls also occur here, enabling the farmer to dispense with irrigation to a great extent. 

All the winds that blow over the Black Hills have swept the plains for great distances, 
and bring what moisture they have gathered to these peaks to be condensed into rain. These 
hills, therefore, manufacture their own climate and manage to keep their vegetation green and 
fresh when the plains are parched with thirst. Some localities, however, do more condensing 
Avork than others, for the contributions vary with the diiferent winds. Those from the north 
bring little moisture with them from the cold Canadian regions; the cargo of the southern winds 
is intercepted long before they reach these latitudes, and the Pacific winds, depositing almost 
all of their moisture in rain and snow along the Rocky Mountains, give the Hills only that 
■which they may have collected on the intervening plains. And so it happens that the eastern 
•winds, sweeping up from the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of all that they 
deposit along the Alleghanies and the Mississippi valley, bring the heaviest freight of moisture 
-with them for distribution along these eastern slopes. 

The great product of these valleys is wheat. That is, more attention has been given 
to its cultivation, and Black-Hills wheat grades higher in the market today than that of North- 




NEVADA GULCH, UkiKING 1-K( )M GKHKN MOUNTAIN 



ern Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, or Iowa. But the growth of all small grains is equally 
luxuriant, and corn, heretofore supposed to require totally different conditions, is now beginning 
to prove a sure crop. The similitude between the flora of these hills and that of southern 
Maine and New Hampshire in the same latitude, determined by late scientific explorations, would 
indicate that the fruits and vegetables of those States must also flourish here. These things 
will all be verified as soon as agriculturists will have entirely supplanted the farming-miners, 
brought into the country by the gold, and who turned to land claims only as a makeshift when 
mining claims were not within reach. 

Ascending the foothills that overlook Sturgis, one comes suddenly in view of Bare Butte. 
Unlike the usual western formation called butte, this particular Indian watchtower is of rock, 
with evidences of erosion, — what the miners call float. It is difficult to form an idea of a 
butte if one has never seen any. 1 fancy that the etymology of the word is French, for these 
"mounds" occur more frequently throughout that part of the west that was thoroughly explored 
by French missionaries and voyageurs. A butte is generally a formation of yellowish clay, bare 
of vegetation and strangely suggestive of a construction, a fortress, or a town of queer roofs 
huddled together within a stuccoed wall. They are a great relief to the eye and the mind, 
breaking as they do the horizontal monotony of the plain. There is an indescribable lone- 
someness about them — that lonesomeness which gives personality to inanimate things. To the 
early explorers, the coming upon a butte must have been like the first sight of a caravan to 
a man who is crossing the desert. Bare Butte, in the golden air of Indian summer, seems 
translucent. The projections that are licked by the sun are of various tints of golden brown, 




M;AR STUKCIS. OFFICERS' QUARTERS. 




Halted by pliotog-raph( 



COL. E. V. SUMNER, U. S. A., EXERCISING HIS CAVALRY REGIMENT AT FORT MEAD, S. D. 

" snap shot " as they emerg-ed from the caflon. Cox.. Sumner with hand raised to halt t 



and the shadows of these projections are a deep purple. It lies like a s^reat camel carved out 
of rough topaz and amethyst, looking over a yellow desert. 

It was in the shadow of this butte that the military camp, which eventually became Fort 
Meade, was located. It was then known as Camp Sturgis, in honor of Lieutenant "Jack" 
Sturgis, killed at the Custer massacre. The present situation of Fort Meade was determined by 
General Sheridan in 1876. The site is a superb one, both from a scenic and a strategic 
standpoint. This ten-company post means much to the little town of Sturgis, and in fact to 
the whole county in which it is situated. The quantity of supplies consumed 1\\- its men and 
horses is enormous. 

Our route to Speartish takes us along the race-course, through cultivated lands, by thriv- 
ing farms, well-built farm-houses, fenced fields of the gleaming stubble of oats and timothy, 
Speartish was settled by a retlux from Deadwood. A migration of Montana miners passed 
through this region on their way to Deadwood. Arrived there, they found the placer claims 
all taken up, and determined to retrace their steps and ranch here in the beautiful valley of 
the Speartish Creek. The town is an aggregation of cozy cottages with small orchards and 
shade trees. No evidences of stampede here. Every house, however small, seems to have been 
built for a home. it is the site of the State Normal School, which brings in a floating pop- 
ulation of young men and women from the surrounding farms, and all points of the Hills, on 
learning intent. 

From Speartish to "Nigger" Hills, sixteen miles through a dense pine forest, the air isi 
saturated with a resinous smell. By the ups and downs of tiie road we realize that we are 



traveling west, for the great wall of pines never once opens a breach to let us see the horizon 
and appreciate our ascension. The wind surges through the trees with the mournful monotony 
of the sea. Within this pine forest is a young forest of oaks, and further up a forest of 
aspen, leafless now like trees of silver wire, delicate and fragile, shrouding the body of the 
pines in a haze of vaporous gray. 

Bear Gulch, at the foot of Nigger Hill, has a peculiarly wild and desolate aspect. Some 
ten or twelve log cabins in line along a thin stream constitute the greater part of the Nigger 
Hill Mining Camp. The camp manages to support itself and hold down its tin claims by 
some placer work in the gulches. These gulches, now almost exhausted, have yielded much 
gold. The prospecting for tin was begun here in 1883. Nigger Hill is now covered with 
prospect holes, belonging for the most part to a Deadwood and New York Company, known 
as the American Tin Company. With the exception of a few shafts, one of which is one 
hundred and forty-seven feet deep, with two drifts of sixty feet, there has been nothing done 
here but surface work. The dumps from every prospect show rich ore, but the developments 
have not been sutTicient to show the nature of the deposits. Capitalists are afraid to invest 
lest the veins turn out to be pockets, and the miners are afraid to sell for pockets that which 
might turn out to be veins. A little of this tin has been smelted, and, combined with placer 
tin from the same locality, has been made into pure shining bars, which have been shipped 
to various points in the West, and as American tin have attracted no little attention. Since 
the comparative exhaustion of placer gold, in the seven or eight gulches about Nigger Hill, a 
carbonate of copper, carrying free gold has been discovered on Mineral Hill, at a distance of 




IS^ 


9B*cn*?^:^BQEpSjK ^ 


1 '* WiTJ 


- 


" =v* v5WF> 


V 


m 




'i 



three or four miles from here. Fabulous stories are told of this new strike, and wonderful 
specimens shown to corroborate them. We dine deliciously on grouse and fresh vegetables at 
this lonely Bear-Gulch camp, and turn our horses' heads eastward again. 

Nothing could be more beautiful than the valley drive between the Spearfish, and the 
Belle Fourche. It is two hours at least before we strike the rolling stock range. The sun 
is almost warm, the light intense; there is not a cloud in the sky. The ground is covered 
with the frizzled buffalo grass, short and thick like a closely-woven mat, the most nutritious 
grass in the West; and above it the taller, finer grasses rise like a haze. Every now and 
again we pass one of the beautiful streams where cattle come to water. 

The Belle Fourche river, the beautiful fork of the Cheyenne, gives its name to a little 
town opened on the first of last June, and now a shipping point of no small importance. 
From June to October, 60,000 head of cattle were taken from here by the Fremont, Elkhorn 
& Missouri Valley Railroad. This is essentially the cowboy's pied-a-terre. With its floating 
population, it counts some two hundred and fifty souls. Almost half again that many today. 
This is Fair day, and the ranches within a radius of twenty-five miles have emptied themselves 
here to witness the races. Ponies are anchored by their hanging bridles in a long line along 
the row of stores and cabins that form the town. Every imaginable vehicle from sulkies to 
hay-racks stand outside, tilted forward, with their shafts and poles on the ground. Flaring 
bills tacked upon every available background proclaim the attractions of the race-course. Besides 
the usual trotting, pacing and running races, there are to be steer-roping contests, ladies' races, 
and then as a bouquet a purse of twenty-five dollars for the cowboy who will start his pony, 




ON TOP OK BAKE BM 



ilS AND FORT MEAD. 



mount, light a cigar, open an umbrella, dismount, mount again and be back at the stand in 
a given number of minutes. In the parlor of the hotel where we stop for an hour that 
our horses may be fed, we find numerous other evidences of the fair. The walls are hung 
with much elaborate fancy work; satin banners painted to represent embroidery, satin banners 
embroidered to represent painting, all more or less awry on their brass rods, many species of 
crochet work, and every variant of the tidy. A number of women sit here while their hus- 
bands have gone to "hitch." Two girls are talking over the winter's course at the Spearfish 
Normal School. A small, bony German woman and a ponderous American in sealskin and 
black plumes are excitedly discussing a conjugal problem which refers to the question, whether 
milking the cow is the duty of the man or the woman. 

Our horses ready, we push on toward Sundance, over miles of stock range. This 
grass land sweeping off to the horizon in every direction has some of the grandeur of the 
desert with all the cheerful beauty of fertility. In the summer this is a vast many-colored 
meadow. Now it is all gold; the frost has gilded it. There is a fascination in looking 
over the wheels at the ground running from under us, and noticing the infinite variety of 
grasses that go to make a prairie; the short copper-tinted blades, the greenish-yellow frizzles, 
the silky meshes with all the lights and shadows of golden hair, the stretches that are like a 
pale haze powdered with fine seeds. It is like the fascination of looking over the edge of a 
ship into the blue and green lights of the sea. 

The stockman in these parts has indeed little expense and less care. The cattle and 
horses roam over the range all winter. The grasses which cure into rich hay on the ground 



give them a pasture as nutritious in January as it is in June. All that is required of him 
is that he knows his own stock. "The Black Hills are gold from the grass roots down, but 
there is still more gold from the grass roots up," is perhaps the wisest remark ever attributed 
to " California Joe." 

As we approach Sundance, a broken line of hills rises along the yeUow horizon. The 
sun is setting without a cloud to catch the colors. The hills assume metallic tints like the 
blues and greens of verdigris. The west is all of a reddish copper glow, which shoots over 
the dome of the sky and hangs over the east in a faint pink, so faint that it is like a blush 
in the air. The disk of the sun is blood red and enormous. A little bunch of horses, 
startled at our appearance, stop still for a second on the summit of a mound directly in front 
of us, and stand with flying manes in strange black foreshortenings against the sun. In the 
pink blush of the east, a star of silver filigree is taking to itself light. 

In the heart of the cattle country rises Sundance Mountain, an almost isolated elevation, 
rock-flanked and level-topped, like a great stage upon which one can fancy the Indians per- 
forming their religious dance with the witness of the horizons. In its shadow is the white 
town of Sundance, evolved out of a road ranch and a saloon as soon as farms began to 
spring up in the valley and the rising stock industry had begun to sprinkle the range with 
horses and cattle. It is now an agricultural as well as a stock center. 

By virtue of the Hatch Bill, which passed Congress in 18S7, Wyoming established live 
agricultural stations or experimental farms. The last settled was at Sundance, in May, l89l. 
Forty-nine acres of land were purchased by private subscription and donated to the State Agri- 



cultural College. Of these forty-nine acres, forty were devoted to the culture of grain and 
vegetables, and nine to that of tame grasses. In these few months of experiment, wheat 
grading No. 1 hard, was produced in abundance, and the average yield of beets was found to 
be six tons to an acre. The experiments next year will chiefly concern small fruit and forestry. 
The meteorological record of the farm contains the following data: Altitude of Sundance 4,700 
feet; average mean temperature for August 63.05 degrees, rainfall 2.02 inches. 

We are here within near sight of the Bear Lodge range, and here Inyan Kara ("the 
peak which makes stone") stands six hundred feet out of an encircling rim that suggests the 
throat of a crater. It is so abrupt that it seems perpendicular at some angles. The igneous 
Tocks of v/hich it is composed, like Bare Butte, have all the deep, gorgeous tones of rough 
jewels. Warren's Peak, the crowning peak of the Bear Lodge range, though some two thou- 
sand feet higher, is less prominent for being set in the center of others which diminish gradu- 
ally and reach the valley by rounded, grass-covered steps. 

From these heights one looks out upon an infinite of blue and down upon Mato Tepee, 
the Bear Lodge which gives its name to the range. Mato Tepee is generally known as the 
Devil's Tower; for it seems that among the Indians it is more commonly spoken of now as 
"The Tower of the Bad God." At this distance it looks like an obelisk of basalt on a flat 
plain. The current hypotheses are in favor of its being the core that was left standing when 
a cataclysm had torn open some great volcano by the mouth and scattered its flanks, or then 
of its having been ejected with great violence when in a liquid state, then solidified by sudden 
cooling. But the geologists who have studied this region believe that the tower was forced 



up through the sedimentary strata under great pressure, and at such a temperature as to make 
it plastic rather than fluid; that had it been otherwise, the sedimentary rocks tilted around it 
would have been more metarmorphosed than they are, by igneous heat. Approaching it from 
Sundance, it presents a number of varied aspects, according to the different angles from which 
it is seen. Now a great fluted column, a tall, black, truncated cone; then again a tremendous 
organ whose pipes shoot out of a hill and converge at the top. It is gray or black or pur- 
ple, in sympathy with the clouds or the sun, and as one draws nearer, the great pipes seem to 
pull themselves out indefinitely toward the sky. Standing at its base, one realizes that these col- 
umns are triangular or hexagonal crystals of a yellowish drab, delicately tinted with green. 
They are, as it were, the fibres of the obelisk, and rise over six hundred feet perpendicularly 
out of a massive base. The entire tower is over eleven hundred feet high from the Belle Fourche, 
on the bank of which it stands. The hill which forms its pedestal is a mass of huge rocks, 
parts of the crystals fallen from time to time. The impression produced by this isolated and 
mysterious structure is one of amazement. It has never been scaled, and adventurous tourists 
must ever stand hopeless at its base with all of the longing which is bred of prohibition. 



From Sundance to Newcastle, October 20. — It is a typical Wyoming day. The 
sky is of indigo. A moon of then white lace is setting between gauzy swirls of wind clouds. 
There is a fierceness in the light which strikes blinding flashes from the plowshares, and makes 
the streams look like hard, polished steel. The land is of every tone and quality of gold, 
from the metallic glitter of the wheat stubble to the dull haze of the wild grasses upon which 




THK HISTllKIC " CKUW BUTTI:," NORTHWEST NEBRASKA 



the wind makes little shadow eddies. Bunches of horses with flying manes are herded past 
us. It is astonishing how long we can see them. Their forms and movements are perfectly 
distinct when they have dwindled to the size of dogs. Then we lose the motion, they appear 
to be standing still, then they suddenly seem to shrivel and be dissolved in light. 

At the end of some thirty miles, our road begins to climb the side of a densely 
wooded hill. We go down into ravines, then up again, higher each time, the horizon expand- 
ing and sinking around us. At a brusque turn we leave the trees and find ourselves on the 
top of an immense grassy Mesa, looking out in every direction over a boundless expanse of 
blue. The impression is startling and wonderful. It is as though we were crossing a great 
yellow island suddenly emerged from out of a turquoise sea. The fantastic impression lasts 
for several miles, then we begin the descent, receiving from the edge of the Mesa the first 
announcement of the Cambria Coal Mines in great columns of black smoke. In a sudden 
transition from this dreamy height we drop into a canon with a black atmosphere, where 
locomotives are whistling and switching, cars being loaded from a chute with a noise as of a 
hailstorm on a tremendous scale. We pass immense smoke-stacks, coke ovens smoking quietly 
a thin smoke which hangs over them like mist, substantially built offices, stores, eating-houses, 
cabins, and cottages, around which children with facial lines comically emphasized by coal dust, 
run about and play. At the mouth of the canon we are stopped by the town of New 
Castle, which surprises us with its resemblance to a miniature metropolis. 

Our hundred-mile drive across country from New Castle to Rapid City is a grand 
epitome of all our previous drives through the Hills. We have scores of miles among ranches. 




VK LAKL, l.AriU CITY, S. D. DR. McGlLLICUDDY IN THE BOAT. 



farms, cattle ranges, and as many again over divides, from the height of which we get won- 
derful panoramas of distant hills and gleaming plains; then down the divides we go, over 
slopes of rich grass into glens and shad d parks full of grouse and red squirrel. We enter 
canons that are lonely and resonant like sea sh lis, then out over grass land, which makes 
the world seem like a yellow floor under a blue canopy. The horizon is constantly contract- 
ing and expanding around us. The sun rises and sets with extravagant splendor for our par- 
ticular delectation. The towns where we spend 'he night or through which we drive become 
mere incidents of the gr at mysterious lif , whose real features are dreamy hills and sunsets. 

Somewhere in the last half of this hundred-mile drive we come upon the source of 
Rapid River, the largest and most impetuous stream of the Hills, and one of the few which 
carries its waters overground all the way to the Cheyenne. For a considerable distance it 
sings along quietly enough, picki:ig up the contributions that trickle down side gorges, until its 
bed begins to tilt and it is sent hurrying down a wild canon to the valley. As our road 
climbs over its last divide, we can look down and see it describing shining curves through 
great flats of grass sprinkled with trees. Here the foothills open a wide gate, and on the 
very threshold among these shining curves lies the town of Rapid City. No situation could 
be more favorable for a manufacturing post. Besides the advantages of the Rapid River as a 
water power, it is placed so as to form a natural channel through which much that the Hills, 
produce in minerals and agriculture must pass and be transformed before it goes out to the plains. 

Here are valleys watered by abundant streams, where crops are grown ; hills covered 
with forests of pine to be reduced to lumber and used for building, etc. Here is to be found 




CHLORINATION WORKS AT KAPIU CITY, ^. U. 



the best, and in fact, the only clay from which that beautiful cream-colored brick, which has made 
Milwaukee, Wis., famous, can be manufactured. Recognizing these advantages of natural location, 
factory interests began to spring up. Two roller flouring mills, which are run by water-power 
and which make two hundred to two hundred and fifty barrels of flour per day, were built. Also, 
sawmills, sash, door and blind factory, electric light and power works, bottling works, etc., and what is 
of great importance, a mill for the reducing of ores by the chlorination process. These chlori- 
nation works, completed within a few months, receive the ores from mines above Deadwood, 
by the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad. They run night and day, reducing one hun- 
dred tons of ore per day, and being found totally inadequate to meet the requirements, the works 
are being enlarged to double their capacity. Even then, they will form only a nucleus of groups 
of similar mills which must be built to accommodate the enlarged and increasing demand. 
These works take the ores as they come from the mine, and passing them through the various 
stages, never release them till the final product is taken from the crucible in the bullion 
ingots. It is a devious and curious path this ore travels. We see the raw ore dumped from 
the chute into a funnel which reaches the roaster. We quickly commence descending to follow 
its course through the din of poundings and crushings, as if a mighty monster were making 
a meal by crunching rocks. We find our way through dust and heat to a room in which 
are tubes and belts and beams, and our guide, raising a lid, shows us the pulverized ore which 
has passed the roaster and is now going through the crushers and trickling down in powdered 
sand; closing this and descending another stairway, he opens another lid and shows us a series 
of little tin buckets attached to a leather belt, chasing each other up a long tube, each bucket 



filled with a black powder. We ascend again, stairway after stairway to find this ore, but it 
has, after reaching the top, been dumped from its little buckets and is off in the iron lingers 
of this complicated machinery, and we are told, after it has been washed, "separated," returned, 
etc., it will come into the final room, where what was a whole ton of ore when it started 
into the mill is now but a little dust in a crucible, and when the heat has farther done its 
work, the product of this ton of ore can easily be carried away in the vest pocket. 

The history of Rapid City in no way differs from that of the other valley towns of 
the Hills region. We have the same type of pioneers detaching themselves from the ebbing 
and flowing tide of miners; exploring the valleys in search of a spot upon which to build a 
home; and with that human aspiration for stability which manages to fraternize with the spirit 
of migration, taking care that the chosen spot is an advantageous site, that their homes shall 
become the nucleus of a large settlement. The town is staked out with no more pretentious 
instruments than a tape-line and a pocket compass. One square mile is divided into lots, the 
lots are numbered, and the numbers are shuffled in a hat and passed around — and a new 
town is born. Rapid City is an ambitious, busy little place of 4,000 souls, grinding the 
wheat from the valleys, shipping the stock and packing the beef from the ranges, manufactur- 
ing brick, and supplying the farmers with cash. 



Rushville. — We leave the railroad and find our horses here again for a twenty-six mile 
drive across prairie to the Sioux Agency at Pine Ridge. We are reminded of the Hills only 
by an occasional bare ridge crested with a bristling fringe of pines which cuts the land into 

77 



sections. Between lonj;; intervals of prairie, we come upon the stricken-looiiins;- farm of a half- 
breed or a lonely log cabin with the accompanying tepee standing beside it like a reminiscence. 
An Indian boy, with a half sheet of cotton thrown around him in lieu of a blanket, goes by 
on his pony herding some three or four bony steers. At a little distance, as he kicks his 
pony into a run and sits with outspread arms yelping to his herd, one might take him for 
a diminutive Moor, with a flying bournous. After awhile the log cabins give way to board 
cabins, then further on these are grouped together in a manner somewhat suggestive of a 
frontier military post. This is the Agency. The agent's offices are in a low frame building, 
with benches in front of it, where blanketed forms congregate for a lounge, a gossip, a smoke, 
or a redress of grievances. Here the agent sits at his desk for eight hours out of twelve, 
and listens to complaints of all sorts, from the most tragic to the most trivial. He listens to 
an old man whose son has returned from Carlyle with an education so admirably calculated 
to open his eyes to the condition of his race and its need of civilization, that after lounging 
for some time in the paternal tepee, drawing his rations and meditating upon life, he finds 
that his "heart is bad," wanders oft" to a lonely spot and shoots himself. He listens to a 
squaw whose steer is sick, to an old chief who has a one-acre farm, and thinks that the 
great father should furnish him with a "riding plow," which might in a measure mitigate the 
hardships of a life of labor. An endless litany of nriseries and absurdities, the daily rehearsal 
of a tragic-farce. 

This morning there is a great stir in tiie waiting room adjoining the olllce. Indians 
are pouring in and forming animated groups about the room. We learn that our visit coin- 

78 



cides with that of a senatorial commission. We discover friends among the commissioners, 
and find that we shall have the pleasure of attending a council. The thought of this council 
somehow brings to my mind the great meeting that was held some sixteen years ago, on 
Chadron Creek, not far from here, when the question of purchasing the Black Hills was first 
submitted to the Sioux. These plains never witnessed, 1 fancy, anything more impressively 
splendid. It was in the latter part of September, on one of those blue days of Indian sum- 
mer, when the land seems to radiate light. The commissioners had erected a tent under a 
great cottonwood tree near the creek. From under this canopy they looked out upon a vast 
yellow prairie, saturated with sunshine, a great wave broken by Crow Butte, that stands out 
on the prairie like a Bedouin ruin on an African plain. A small company of cavalry, con- 
sisting of some sixty or seventy men, who had come merely to lend dignity to the occasion, 
were drawn up in line in the rear of the tent, and' there they waited. The Indians were late 
in coming. The commissioners began to believe that they were again to be the victims of a 
willful misunderstanding, and would again retire without having accomplished anything. At last, 
•over a curve of the prairie, apparently out of the light of the air, came a great confused 
mass which broke into color and sound as it advanced. Some four thousand Sioux, divided 
in platoons, brilliant with all their savage paraphernalia of war, eagle feathers and buffalo heads, 
were bearing down upon the council ground on a dead run, waving their rifles in the air and 
singing their war song. When they had come within a few hundred yards of the tent, the 
entire band reined up in line, fired a volley, and then proceeded to describe mad circles around 
fhe tent, yelping and firing without interruption. Great numbers on foot reinforced the horse- 




SIOUX INDIANS AT KOSEBUU. 



men, and also surrounded the tent. There were soon over seven thousand Sioux on the 
grounds, whirling in a vortex at once dazzling and deafening. Suddenly the whole thing 
stopped as with a jerk, the Indians dismounted and took their positions before the tent in con- 
centric circles, a great splotch of intense color on the dull plain; a splotch of color quivering 
with ill will, and reckless with a sense of power. The commissioners were afraid to open 
the council. Then out of the distance, as it happens in fairy tales and in nightmares, came 
a pattering sound, which brought with it two horsemen; two naked men mounted upon ponies 
with a strip of red wool thrown across their backs in lieu of saddles. The smaller of the 
fwo men jumped from his horse, pushed through the ranks of the assembly, and planted 
himself in the center of the council ground. This was Little-Big-Man. The Indians say that 
lie was a small man, but that his voice was like thunder, and that those whom it fell upon 
in anger were blighted and scorched like the pines in a storm. He was not a Sioux. He 
had come from the North, from the Big-Horn country, with a word for the Sioux. In the 
north, there, they had caught wind of this council; they knew what a council and a treaty 
amounted to; so he had taken his pony and come all the way to tell the Sioux not to give 
up their Hills at any price, but rather to turn upon the handful of white men whom they 
had among them, and put an end to the question by killing them on the spot. This address 
was not immediately translated to the commissioners, so that the stir which followed was only 
half intelligible. The Indians rose with their guns in hand. Out of the crowd came " Young- 
Man- Af raid-of-his-Horses. " His soldiers surrounded the tent. The commissioners felt that it 
■was all over with them. " Young-Man- Afraid-of-his-Horses" mounted his pony, stretched out 



his arm, aiul tulJ the Indiiuis to go back to thtir camp until tliey wtre better picpared to 
transact business. His words seemed \'ery few, but they fell on the excitement like a fine 
point on the tense film of a bubble. In an instant the seven thousand Indians had disap- 
peared like a flight of wild birds. 

This was only sixteen years ago. This nKirning thiit_\- or fort}' men are seated on 
benches around the wall of a low meeting room. Along the floor their moccasined feet, 
pointed in and out look, like pieces of Roman mosaic. But for these feet one might forget 
that these are Indians. They have made it a point to come to the council in citizens' clothes. 
There is here and there a suggestion of the army in the way of an old cavalry coat and a 
fatigue jacket. As a study of misfits, it is interesting. it is something beyond the merely 
too-large or too-small of another man's clothes. It is a reminder of the difference in pro- 
portions and form between the race for whom these clothes were made and the one which 
wears them. The coats are all too long-waisted and too sloping in the shoulders; the trousers 
are almost all too short. 

Most of the prominent chiefs are here. Blue Horse, He Dog, Big Roads, Spotted Elk, 
and every imaginable variety of bear and wolf. They each keep the floor as long as they 
are permitted to do so, apparently enjoying the splendid tones of their language. The pith 
of all these speeches is identical. They begin with a retrospective glance over treaties that 
have been violated, and promises unfulfilled; they touch upon their poverty, enumerate their 
needs, which range from an enclosure of the reservation within a barb-wire fence to the dis- 
tribution of spring wagons among the chiefs, and invariably ending with a eulogy of the 



present agent. It is a formal repetition of the daily scene in the agent's office. There is 
little earnestness and even little emphasis in the tone of all this. It is something of a 
splendid-sounding soliloquy, in which a serious skepticism is strangely mingled with the whining 
of a humored beggar. The long pipe is passed from hand to hand, and grunts of approbation 
from all along the line greet any reference made in a general way to the unreliability of 
most commissioners and the neglect of the great father. The commissioners take a few notes, 
renew old promises, and make new ones, and the council is over. The Indians are pleased 
"to have heard themselves talk. It may be six months or a year before they have the 
pleasure of saying all these things over again, with as much form.ality. 



We have seen the Omaha. — The true name of this dance is the "grass dance." 
Its origin dates back to an incident in the history of the Indians of the lower Missouri. It 
Avas during one of those protracted tribal wars. Both armies were encamped on the grass 
flats of the river. The Crows, if I am not mistaken, conceived the stratagem of rising in 
the night, tying grasses around themselves until they looked like sheaves, and then making 
their way in a squatting posture along the treeless plain to the enemy's camp. The enemy 
■were either asleep, or they saw nothing in the swaying of the grasses that struck them, as 
unusual. The Crows accordingly fell upon their foes, and massacred them, and there, among 
the dead, and still representing sheaves, they improvised a dance, so spirited, so beautiful 
according to their conception of beauty that it has been transmitted from tribe to tribe. The 
Sioux called it the Omaha after the tribe from which they received it. It has been permitted 



to survive the sun-dance because it is unaccompanied by pliysical tortures, but in tlie minds of 
tlie educated Indians, its moral influence is far worse. Tliey contend that it stirs the savage 
in their nature, and that there lies much coarseness concealed from us under its grace and 
picturesqueness. 

The Omaha house in which the dance is to be celebrated is an octagonal log house, 
some fifty feet in diameter. It is situated about five miles out of the Agency. We start 
after moon-rise. The night is clear and white, the air deliciously cool without being sharp. 
We have an escort of Indian police riding on either side of us liice phantoms. We go 
swiftly and noiselessly over the prairie, as though we were driving over a well-kempt lawn. 
There is a group of buttes in the distance, lighted in white from behind, touched with silver 
along the top, and casting a great black shadow clearly defined on the ground. It has the 
air of a lonely IVloorish town of white domes and minarets. Some lights are moving about 
from tepee to tepee, forming queer constellations. The tepees themselves, lighted from within, 
glow like night-lamps of fine porcelain. The Omaha house is pouring out of the opening 
in its roof a column of yellow sparks. As we draw near we find the building surrounded 
by a large crowd of women, many of whom are draped in white sheets, which cover their 
heads and are drawn up over their mouths with a decidedly oriental effect. The shorter ones 
are looking in between the cracks with their faces flattened against the logs; the taller ones 
lean over their shoulders or crane their necks to strike the level of a higher crack. From 
within, one sees an unbroken line of eager black eyes along the open space between the logs. 
In the center of the house is a roaring log fire, which finds a glimmering reflection in all 



these eyes. The musicians are stationed in a corner. The orchestral instrument consists of a 
large drum, suspended from sticks that are driven in the ground so as to insure the greatest 
possible amount of vibration. Twelve men sit around it, and beat time to a spirited motif 
in a minor key, which is repeated without the slightest variation during the entire entertain- 
ment. The dancers are nude but for their breech cloths, and here one comes to a full 
realization of the injustice of the modern dress to these superb bronze bodies. They are 
brilliantly painted in reds, yellows and blacks, the yellows being singularly effective. Their 
heads are bristling with eagle feathers variously tinted. Their ears are pierced all along the 
rim with as many as ten or twelve holes, from each of which hangs a silver ring and a 
pendant. Anything in the way of a long-beaded tab, or a war bonnet, with great streamers 
of eagle feathers, is attached at the back of the waist, a reminiscence of the grasses of the 
lower Missouri, no doubt, and trails on the ground, emphasizing those movements of the dance 
which are entirely from the hips. At their knees and their ankles are strings of sleigh bells, 
which form something of a self-acting tambourine accompaniment. A tin clothes-boiler and 
several covered pots stand around the fire. In the clothes boiler a fatted dog is simmering 
quietly. Every now and then the tin lid trembles with a faint sound of a cymbal, and from 
under the edges come fumes as of animal decay made more sickening by being heated. 
There is also a large box of hard-tack, which is the agent's contribution to the entertainment. 
We are the only guests admitted into the house. As soon as we have taken our 
places, one of the musicians thumps the drum, then all twelve start in unison with a wild 
yelp on a high note in a minor key. The rhythm is marked by the most vigorous thump- 



ing, and the dancers spring' to their feet. My attention is particularly attracted to a very 
old Indian, the most conspicuously bedecked and by no means the least spirited of the dancers. 
His dancing consists chiefly of a prancing " sur place," like a race horse before the signal for 
starting is given. He is tall and gaunt, with a face like the antique mask of tragedy, 
painted a deep red. His lips move in a incessant muttering, and when he breaks into a 
yelp his expression is singularly savage. The interpreter tells me that he is Iron Hawk, and 
that he played an important part in the Custer massacre. The Indians, usually reticent, it 
seems, in their references to that event, have frequently spoken of his splendid "boast," made 
on the battlefield strewn with the unfortunates of the Seventh. He could be heard, they say, 
within a radius of a mile, as he walked about among the dead and recounted his experience 
fif the day. 

As soon as the dancers stop to take breath, the yelping and thumping grow louder and 
faster, urging them on into a frenzy. Their muscles become tense, drawn along their thighs 
and under their knees like cords. Their yelps become more and more strident, they prance 
and quiver, until the musicians finally call a halt of their own accord. Then some squat 
along the walls and resume their pipes, and others throw themselves down in superb reclining 
poses, resting on their elbows and screening their faces from the fire with their curved hand. 

From the reclining group a figure rises suddenly and begins to pace the length of the 
building, turning on his heel with the swaying movement of a lion in a cage. After the first 
turn or two, he begins his soliloquy, punctuated by light taps of the drum. The tones of 
this Sioux language are wonderfull\' impressive. It has the full vowel sounds of the old 



Spanish, all the strength of its gutturals, and much of the pompous grandeur of its inflections. 
This particular "boast" must refer to great achievements, if we are to judge of it by the 
grunts of both musicians and dancers, and the twinkling along the line of black eyes peeping 
in between the logs. 

The soliloquy finished, the music begins with redoubled violence. The dance now takes 
the form of a pantomime, something that seems to express adoration, ecstasy, and which 
would do well as an expression of sun- or fire-worship. It is all directed to the clothes 
boiler, where the dog is cooking, and means in this case that the choice morsel is done to 
a turn. Tin cups are distributed among the guests and the dancers; but the atmosphere, warm 
and heavy with tobacco smoke, sweat-melted paint, and the fumes from the boiling dog, has 
become unendurable, and we are glad to get out into the fresh night. 

The moon is directly overhead. The Moorish town of white domes and minarets is 
drenched with light. Our escort of phantom horsemen is again with us. Our wheels and 
our horses' hoofs are inaudible. We lose the last sounds of the Omaha house and become 
submerged in that peculiar stillness which is of the plains and the desert. The whole world 
seems wrapped in a vaporous white dream. 



It is a dazzling day; the sky is pale with light. We stand on a little open pavilion 
outside of a large corral where steers are pawing the ground. The "beef issue" is to begin 
at twelve. It is now five minutes of twelve, and there is not an Indian to be seen anywhere. 
On the platform, beside us, stands the agent, with a memorandum book containing the names 




firrtBM 

BHliF ISSlll: TO INDIANS A r IMNl: KlUGl:, S. U. 



of each representative of the family, or group of twenty-four, which the Government entitles 
to a steer every fortnight. Beside him is the interpreter, and next to the interpreter stands 
' ' Grass," his stout figure closely buttoned in an old cavalry coat which sweeps the ground. 
There is not another Indian on the agency whose voice can carry a name so far into the 
distance as his can. At about three minutes of twelve the prairie is streaked with approach- 
ing flights of ponies. Not only the representative but most of the masculine members of the 
family, or group of twenty-four, are here. The squaws follow at a distance in wagons. The 
men form a line extending about half a mile from either side of the corral chute. They 
wear their best today. Not their citizens' clothes, but what might be called the dress of the 
transition epoch; buckskins and flannel shirts or cloth trousers and beadwork jackets, slouch 
hats decorated with beadwork bands, or no hats at all, only a feather held erect by a band 
of bright-colored cloth. There are a number of boys, too, in flowing white shirts, sitting 
their ponies bare-back. " Grass " steps to the front of the pavilion and acts as the agent's 
mouthpiece in proclaiming various things: That the children have not been attending school 
as they should; that the Indians are requested to chase the steers far out in the prairie before 
they begin to shoot. Then the name of the Indian to whom the first steer belongs is shouted 
by Grass in stentorian tones. The chute is opened, a steer comes running down between a 
double row of horsemen. The man whose name has been called, and as many of his kins- 
men as happen to be present, lift their rifles and spur their ponies in pursuit. The steers 
come down the chute in quick succession, and Grass rattles otf the names with all the might 
of his extraordinary lungs. Every now and then a steer takes a diagonal course and rushes, 



horns down, into the crowd; then follows a kaleidoscopic shifting of forms and colors, accom- 
panied by shrieks and laughter, until he is safely headed towards the open prairie. When 
the last steer has passed down the chute, and the play in the foreground is over, the flat 
distance of the prairie is the scene of a queer chase. In this marvelous atmosphere, whatever 
is at all visible is strangely distinct. Horsemen and steers are running about in the clear 
distance like marionets or mechanical toys. Men an inch high are firing tiny guns, and the 
report which reaches us is fainter than the vibration from a tuning fork. At last, as the 
steers fall, the skurrying little figures resolve themselves into groups and the prairie is dotted 
with color. The wagons go out to them, and the squaws begin their work of skinning and 
disemboweling while the men sit around and smoke. 

This is all that is left of the Butf'alo hunt, and even this is doomed. Pine Ridge and 
Rosebud ai'e the only two agencies in the country where the beef is still issued "on the hoof," 
as they say, and the days of this custom are numbered here. 

it seems well to devote our last evening at Pine Ridge to a visit to Red Cloud. We 
start out at sunset, and walk a mile over a short-bladed, copper-colored field, which glows 
with the red and yellow of a thousand little flames. There is a thin sprinkling of tepees 
over the brilliant ground. To the east is a long line of clayey buttes, which catch the light 
as water or clouds do, or like those Moorish structures of stucco, which the sunset tints with 
the melting pink and violet tones of fresco. Bands of over-grown Indian girls flock past us, 
pursued by young braves. The girls are almost all dressed in red, the youths wrapped in white. 
The girls shriek, laugh, zigzag like swallows, but their pursuers come upon them swift as antelopes. 



Red Cloud has several guests this evening; four or five old Indians smoking their pipes 
and treating him to their conversation. The principal room of the frame cabin is hung with 
American flags, gifts received at Washington, prized, 1 fancy, as pieces of color and works of 
art, rather than symbols. We find him dressed in citizen's clothes, sitting on the edge of 
his bed, his blind eyes covered with convex blue glasses. The room is choking with a 
smell of medicinal herbs. We exchange a few platitudes through the medium of the inter- 
preter. We hope that he may soon recover his sight, he hopes that there may never be 
any more Indian troubles. The old chief has a fine face, whose nobility is emphasized by 
that impassiveness peculiar to the blind. We slip a quarter into his hand, which he accepts 
without reluctance or eagerness, and leave him to the conversation of his cronies. It is not 
unlikely that chiefdom as an institution will die with him; so, historically speaking, this ill- 
smelling little cabin has some of the significance of a royal death-chamber. 



October twenty-ninth. — It is a chilly twilight. We have left the Hills far behind us. Our 
train is streaking eastward through the farms of Nebraska. Our fellow travelers are for the 
most part farmers, conversational and self-congratulatory. Beyond the car window the land 
lies in gentle undulations, which now and again stilTen into a straight line, rimmed with red 
along the horizon. Here we find the tumbleweed again, the little lace-like bush with weak 
roots, which the lightest wind dances over the ground like a puff of smoke, forever taking 
root and being uprooted, curious prototype of the migratory spirit of the Great West. 



The tourist who goes to the Black Hills with a limited space of time to dispose of, 
who cannot manage to climb Harney's Peak or wander about at leisure through the wonderful 
canons of the granite region, and still would like to have an idea of the general configuration 
of these mountains and enjoy their characteristic beauties in a condensed form, as it were, 
could not better satisfy himself than by taking a trip on one of the marvelous narrow-gauge 
routes which, starting from Deadwood and Lead City, take one far into the mountains, through 
the most picturesque scenery of the Hills. Mountains often hide their beauties as they do 
their treasures, and but for these narrow-gauges, which seem to attack any grade and which 
fear no curves, all of that which constitutes wild and impressive scenery, dark gulches and 
sonorous canons, would remain unknown to the great majority of travelers. But through them 
everything is arccessible. They turn like a snake at the head of a gulch, run up perpendicu- 
lar heights, down precipitous inclines, and skirt the mountain side where there scarcely seems 
to be a foothold. 

There are two of these scenic routes in tlie Hills: the Fremont, Hlkhorn & Missouri 
Valley system, and the Black Hills & Fort Pierre. The tirst-mentioned of these was con- 
structed in 1891, for the purpose of bringing down the ore from the active mines to Dead- 
wood, the commercial center of the mining district of the Black Hills. Its first line starts 
up Deadwood gulch and follows the south slope of the mountain to the head of the gulch; 
there it crosses on a trestle, and still climbing, attacks the north slope of the opposite moun- 
tain. On reaching the divide between Deadwood and Nevada gulches, it rounds the point to 
Fantail gulch, runs up to its head, then loops around (he minintain and turns into the Ruby 



Basin District at the head of Whitetail Creek. The Portland line of the same system branches 
off at the " summit divide," between Deadwood and Nevada Gulches. It skirts the south side 
of Bald Mountain, climbs between Bald and Green Mountains, past the Mark Twain Mine, 
and over to the plateau where is situated the rather famous "Portland Mine," for which, 
several years ago, the machinery was hauled in wagons all the way from Pierre, a distance 
of two hundred and twenty-five miles. 

From this height the view is as imposing as it is from any point in the Hills. On 
the way up to it, one looks down into deep gulches or across them to the mountain sides 
that form their walls — walls which are sometimes precipitous and rocky, and sometimes curving 
slopes of shrubbery and wild flowers. Every curve shifts the scene, shows another face of 
the mountain, and the puzzle of tracing the tracks below, of connecting horse-shoes and loops, 
becomes more and more intricate. One leans out and looks down with the feeling of being 
suspended in mid-air. After an hour's climb, the whole foreground begins to sink. Through 
an occasional break comes a glimpse of blue, or the symmetrical top of a distant peak, then 
at some sudden turn the entire horizon shows itself like an immense panorama. 

From this outlook one can see almost all the great landmarks of the Hills: to the 
west the dark mass of the Bear Lodge Mountains; Twin Buttes, Deer's Ears and Bare Butte, 
although more than a hundred miles away, rise distinctly out of the great plains which extend 
straight on as far as the eye can reach, and meet the sky at the line of the horizon. On 
the south-east is Custer's Peak, which alone obstructs the view of Mount Harney and Terry's 
Peak, second in height among all the peaks of the Hills. 



Ilie Black Hills & Fort Pierre Railroad starts from Lead City and takes one through 
some thirty miles of wild and beautiful scenery to Piedmont, where it intersects the Fremont, 
h'lkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad. The Elk Creek Cafion, into which it plunges shortly 
after this intersection, leaves an impression which is worthy of Colorado. The road belongs 
to the owners of the Homestake mines at Lead City, and was originally built for the purpose 
of handling the wood required by the mines for fuel and braces. Almost all the materials for 
the construction of this wonderful little road, including its engines and cars, were brought by 
wagon from Sidney, three hundred miles. 

Let nobody go to the Black Hills without devoting a day to these mountain routes. 
For those who are called there by business interests, there could be no easier holiday, no more 
delightful form of mental rest. 

Hardly a score of years has passed since the vast empire of agricultural and mineral 
wealth embraced in the northern portion of Nebraska, and that portion of South Dakota m 
which the Black Hills are located, was virtually an unknown wilderness. It is a little more 
than a decade since the muddy waters of the Missouri marked the northwestern boundary of 
civilization, and the jom-ney into the wilderness beyond was fraught w'lth difficulties and dan- 
gers that would have disheartened a less fearless race than were the pioneers to whose persist- 
ency and enterprise we are indebted for the development that has made the region referred to 
one of the most favored that the sun shines upon. The vast prairies, the home of the 
hidian and the bufl'alo, were, to the white man, an unknown country, where the markings of the 



3W 



■trail were bleaching bones that mutely told of the fate that had befallen many a caravan that 
had been overpowered by the hostile tribes; the t> 

remnants of which are now the nation's docile ^ '^ 

wards; delighting in the luxury of an existence 
which does not entail the penalty that would fol- 
low a literal application of the divine law: "By 
"the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." 
But, that the reward of the courage and zeal of 
"the pioneers who first overcame the countless dif- 
ficulties and reached the goal, was commensurate 
with the perils that were encountered at every 
turn, is demonstrated by the acres of golden 
grain, the countless flocks and herds, and the 
fhrifty homes that now dot the landscape and be- 
speak the prosperity of the husbandman, as well 
as by the thriving cities and the bustling mining 
camps peopled by the toilers who wrest from the 
rock-ribbed hills the mineral wealth that has made 
fhe Black Hills famous the world over. 

The journey from Chicago to the Hills, BOUDOIR CAR. 

■that a few years ago was the hazardous labor of months, and fraught with untold hardships 





BUFFET CAR. 



and dirticulties, is now accomplished with the 
speed, ease and security incident to that enter- 
prising management of American railways, which 
has made them the marvel of the entire world. 
The laborious trail, with its trains of " Prairie 
Schooners," has been replaced by the highway 
of glistening steel and luxurious palace cars, in 
which the traveler is conveyed from the World's 
Fair City across Illinois, Iowa, and through 
northern Nebraska to the Black Hills, with a 
speed that is rivalled only by the wind that 
transforms the prairies with their wealth of wav- 
ing grain into a billowy sea of gold. 

The North -Western Line, one branch of 
which extends from Chicago to the Black Hills, 
was the pioneer in introducing railway facilities 
to this favored region, in the development of 
which it has been a most important factor; pro- 
viding an outlet for the products of the mines 
and prairies, and keeping pace with the devel- 
opment of the country, it is conceded to be 



one of the leading railways of the world. It is not only the direct and popular route 
between Chicago and the Black Hills, but it reaches nearly every important business center in 
Northern Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, TJorthern Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota 
and Wyoming, and by a close traffic alliance with the Union Pacific System, its patrons are 
enabled to make the journey from Chicago to Denver, Portland, Ogden, Salt Lake and San Fran- 
cisco, and the numerous intermediate cities, in trains providing through car accommodations, and 
every convenience and luxury incident to an equipment of the highest order of excellence. 

To be brief, the North-Western Line provides the highest order of facilities for a safe, 
quick and comfortable journey from Chicago to the region described in the foregoing pages, 
and full information that will prove of great assistance in arranging the details for a trip to 
"The Wonderful Black Hills" will be cheerfully furnished by any representative of the North- 
Western Line. 

W. .A.. nr^Tr^FiAX^X^, J. T^. I3TiJC:tIA.TXA.r<, 

General Passenger and Ticket Agciii^ General Passenger Agent, 

Chicago Jc North-western Railway, Fremont, Elkhorn it Missouri Valley H. R,, 






IJii 




2 1 nil 1 



11 





THE NEW EVANS, HOT SPPlNCs. s. i 



.A. !=• F* E^ isr D I zx: . 



No book which pretends to give a correct impression of a growing western town can 
escape an appendix; for a growing western town does not stand still, even while the printers 
are putting its merits in type. 

When this little book was written Hot Springs was already famous throughout many 
States of the Northwest for the wonderful cures accomplished there. There were few towns of 
Nebraska, Dakota or Iowa that had not sent its sufferers there and gotten them back trans- 
formed. Since then, however, its growth has been remarkable. Its development as a town 
shows itself in public buildings, stores and business blocks, while increasing popularity as a 
pleasure and health • resort manifests itself in new hotels, boarding houses and numerous cottages. 
"The Evans," erected on the site of the Minnekahta, which was destroyed some months ago 
by fire, is a building which would do honor to any of the famous watering places in the 
country. It is a massive structure, 126 feet square and five stories high, built of the hard 
pink sandstone that is found in such quantities all through this southern portion of the Hills. 
It is capable of accommodating about three hundred guests. Its piazzas are spacious, shaded by 
a sloping roof, which makes of them great open-air living rooms by day and smoking rooms, 
promenade halls, or hop rooms in the evening. 



Annexed to the hotel is ;i buth-house, containing; litty bath-rooms, constructed after the 
most approved designs, offering every luxury and furnished with a competent corps of attendants. 

The springs known as the Catholicon, which though apparently less commodious than 
the other sanitariums, were always liberally patronized on account of the wonderful cures that 
have been effected there, have recently been purchased by a syndicate, who are now construct- 
ing a large bath-house, are repairing and enlarging their hotel, and are about to build a new 
hotel on the high grounds just above the Catholicon Springs. This hotel will be completed 
and ready for occupancy by May I, 1893. Other improvements will be made on the same 
property, and will greatly add to the attractions which tiie Hot Springs will furnish next year. 

Motels at Hot Springs. 

Xames. Kooms. Kates I'ER Day. Kates i-kk Week. 

The Evans 1S4 ?2.50 to S4.00 _.. ?12. 50 to §25.00 

Hot Springs House 65 i 2.00 lO.OO to 14.00 

Gillespie _ 60 2.00 to 3.00 8.00 to 18.00 

.^arrott 39 1.50 to 2.CKi 7.00 to 14.00 

Catholicon 44 1.50 to 2.oo 7.00 to 16.00 



il 




the 
ha' 

ho 



pn 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 432 597 7 



